About me

My name is Amy and I've been blogging on CDG since 2005. A mama of two living in Colorado, I'm passionate about attachment parenting, health and wellness, green living, essential oils, urban homesteading and unschooling/home schooling.

Go Meatless One Meal Per Week

Today I want to talk briefly about one of the ways we’ve chosen to “Go Green” in my house and that is by rarely, if ever, eating beef. Here’s a weird but true fact from OMAOG about cows:

Cows are a major contributor to greenhouse gases. As the old adage says, what goes in must come out, and for cattle, a lot of what comes out is methane gas. And just like carbon, methane gas gets trapped in our atmosphere. Since the 1960s, the amount of methane in the air has increased by 1% per year—twice as fast as the build up of carbon dioxide. As worldwide demand for beef increases, so do the number of cows and the methane they produce. Also, in many countries around the world, forests are being clear cut to make room for growing beef. Cutting down trees reduces the planet’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide.

Also, if you haven’t yet heard of Meatless Monday, you might want to schedule your vegetarian meal of the week for Mondays to coincide with it (and maybe even plan on going meatless for the entire day). Meatless Monday is a non-profit initiative (totally unrelated to OMAOG) that provides recipes and info to start each week with healthy, environmentally friendly meat-free alternatives. The goal of Meatless Monday is “to help you reduce your meat consumption by 15% in order to improve your personal health and the health of the planet.”

At our house for dinner tonight we had eggs with spinach, salsa and cheese. We tend to eat about 50% of our meals without meat and although I don’t always schedule them to coincide with Meatless Monday, today it just worked out. (In other words, I was feeling lazy and eggs were a quick and easy dinner. *wink*)

If you eat meat, do you take a meal or day (Meatless Monday) off from it each week? If not, would you try it?

Disclosure: Rockfish Interactive, in partnership with Cisco, is compensating me for my considerable time on this project. However, my ideas, words, and opinions are my own and are not influenced by this compensation.

We buy meat directly from real farms and never eat factory farmed, not even when out. We never eat meat more than one meal per day and often not even that. We eat meat for health reasons – we are not healthy on a vegan diet. Check out Real Food by Nina Plank or Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon or the Weston Price Foundation website. I know lots of people who fell prey to the vegan diet fad and were unhealthy for years because of it. We don’t eat meat as much as those sources advocate, but it is an important part of our diet.

Thanks for sharing this idea. I’ve been vegetarian for 16 years and people always ask me, “What do you eat?” As if there’s nothing else to a meal than meat. My boyfriend and roommate eat meat, and to inspire a meatless day for them each week, we cook a meal together. All summer it was grilled veggies. They always love the meals.

I’ve been really curious about this. Our family has cut back on meat because we’ve switched to non-factory meat and it’s more expensive. We’re happy to do it for the environmental benefits. Does anyone know if grass-fed/finished beef produces less methane than the corn-fed kind? I would think they’d have less flatulence if they were fed an appropriate diet, but I’m dying to find out for sure.

Meat also can make you constipated so a meatless day makes your body pretty happy. I know some are totally against meat. I don’t eat very much but on occasion some good red meat makes me feel better. Not very often though. I’m an “almost” vegetarian.